Increasing retell narrative skills by teaching basic story structure to children in special education in Iceland

Abstract

Establishing and evolving narrative skills is an important factor in a child's development and future academic and personal success. Story Champs is a multi-tiered language intervention curriculum whose main purpose is to develop language skills systematically. The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of a newly translated Story Champs curriculum targeting the Basic Story Structure – Retell, with three adolescents in a special education setting using multiple probe design across participants. Participants were exposed to 12 simple stories with five training phases within each lesson, targeting five components within a story: Character, Problem, Action, Feeling, and Ending. Results suggest that overall basic story structure retell narrative skills increased for all students. Retell narrative skills for two students were maintained over a month period and above baseline for one. Notably, since basic story structure narrative skills are complex, many variables within the environment and participants' history can affect the presentation of each component in students' retell. This is the first experiment in Iceland where the effect of Story Champs is studied. Further research should focus on evaluating each phase of the lesson plan and if setting mastery criteria before phase change will further affect the generalization probe. Keywords: Narrative Skills, Story Champs, Macrostructure, Story Grammar Components, Retell, Special Education